Travel Tips Straight from a Seasoned Flight Attendant

Heather Poole, a real-life flight attendant, always has a ton of travel tips for new travelers and frequent fliers. She gives readers twenty tips for traveling, here's an example of one:

A real frequent flier knows to check the inbound flight when checking to see if their flight is delayed.

How to Keep Your Luggage Safe

Huffington Post offers a behind the scenes look at stories and tips of a baggage handler, which helps travelers identify ways to keep their luggage safe.

Some suggestions include:

• not packing red wine or alcohol in a suitcase
• making sure to have the correct destination on your bag tag and removing any old tags
  
• avoiding buying luggage with handles that are sewn on or very flimsy 

The article offers more involved stories and tips so take a look at their suggestions for how to keep your luggage safe.

Packing Tip for Business Travel

Smart Women Travelers offers a travel tip for packing your clothes in your luggage:

If your luggage does not have a fold-out section for you to lay out your clothes, then roll them up. Rolling them seems to save space and also keeps wrinkles to a minimum. In case of wrinkles, the above site also has small sizes of WrinkleSpray and Febreze to freshen up your clothes.

Infographic: Flying with Presents - What Items to Not Place in Checked Baggage

With the holidays fast approaching, here's a travel infographic for business travelers advising what items to not place in your checked bags or luggage. The items are divided into valuables, critical item, fragile items, and perishables. If your are planning on bringing presents back from your business travel, take a look at the packing advice below.

Passport Travel Tip

A helpful passport travel tip for one of those "in case of emergency" situations is to leave your travel itinerary and passport information with a friend or relative in case you lose the originals. Another helpful tip is to make a copy of your travel documents and carry them in a separate location from the originals.

What are the Current Airline Baggage Fees?

Airfarewatchdog has a chart of compiled the airline baggage fees - the chart is constantly updated and is recent as of June 7, 2011. The chart is divided by airline and lists fees for first checked bag, second checked bag, additional bags, overweight bags, and oversized bags.

I've been lucky in choosing flights that didn't have airline baggage fees, but now it seems that every airline has one nowadays. On my last trip, I made the mistake of not checking AirTran's baggage fee and kicked myself for not packing lighter. Check before booking or packing!

Photo credit: airfarewatchdog.com